DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
In my experience, the people who get angry about their ID getting checked aren't really correlated with race. It's mostly old men who are upset that they're aging and aren't even getting the consolation prize of not needing to get their ID checked.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
"I'm sorry sir. I just have to scan the ID of anyone who looks under 30" (guy looks 17)
Despite the presence of a posted sign that says that we only have to check the ID of anyone who looks under 40, management requires that we check the ID of everyone period. I'm honestly not sure how much of this is that management thinks we're too retarded to estimate people's ages and how much of it is management figuring that it'll offend people (mostly women) for us to estimate that they look over 40 regardless of accuracy.
DiscourseMagnus
8d ago
I, for one, am strongly in favor of calling these people actors and actresses, not out of respect towards prostitution but out of disrespect towards acting.
DiscourseMagnus
11d ago
I get some sort of autistic pleasure from obfuscating language
That doesn't sound very autistic at all, actually.
DiscourseMagnus
12d ago
I think the MAGA base genuinely cares about
I have a pretty hard time believing anyone with any real power cares about
No contradiction spotted.
DiscourseMagnus
20d ago
I agree that the story buries the lede here, but I don't think that the "criminals" aspect is the red herring, it's obviously the part that makes it interesting; unfaithful spouses are sadly rather commonplace in this day and age. The buried lede is the pictures of children related to her, which strongly suggests, IMO, that something more sinister is going on than "mere" rampant infidelity, and casts light on the depths of the hybristophilia: she's actually trying to create as terrible of a problem as possible.
Assuming, of course, that the story's real, which is a pretty bad assumption. It could also be the storyteller trying to create as terrible of an imaginary problem as possible. But taken at face value it is the character's doing.
DiscourseMagnus
22d ago
Epstein very likely killed himself in a physical sense, but there's a non-zero chance he was coerced/blackmailed/bribed into doing this
One would think that if they went to all the effort of making him commit suicide instead of just murdering him, they would have made the scene of the suicide less suspicious.
DiscourseMagnus
22d ago
...does it count that he's a journalist?
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
It is if you go off the beaten path of the internet. The difference you're recognizing is that the beaten path of the internet didn't used to be all that much of it insofar as it existed at all. But you'll still be bombarded with porn ads and porn spam if you use imageboards, pirate, etc.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Surely you can do both; don't have premarital sex, but, as a fallback option, of course single motherhood is better than many alternatives.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Realistically speaking, if Iran develops nukes relations between the two countries will probably just follow the India-Pakistan model.
The model that came horrifically close to nuclear war earlier this year, and would still seem to be on a long-term trajectory towards it?
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
With current AI, sure, but we might not be too far away from AI bridging that gap from the other side.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Yes, if we do manage to create truly transformative AI that obviates labour everything is on the table - I'm not too interested in litigating AGI timelines but if that does happen it's not just going to be a weak white collar labour market, we're walking out the other end gods or 6 feet under.
6 feet under what? Very amusing to imagine a superintelligence apathetic enough to exterminate humanity but sentimental enough to bury us afterwards.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I have observed the same thing and I also think that the trans phenomenon is clearly one of social contagion, but I think your particular argument is very weak, practically self-defeating. Autism is generally understood to be an in-born condition of biological/genetic origin, and transgender activists would typically argue that they're the same way. A correlation between these conditions is exactly the kind of thing they'd predict.
It's much clearer to observe the spread of trans stuff through a community, how insular and tight-knit communities wind up disproportionately transgender through cultish dynamics and the memetic equivalent of the founder effect.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
To be clear, you're arguing that the side of the political aisle that voices moral disapproval of the industrialized slaughter of infants thereby demonstrates themselves to be Naziesque?
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
If a man is so desperate for female attention that he'll suck up to a child killer or would-be child killer, he demonstrates his own failed moral character as well. He "matters" as any human being matters, but he should feel lucky he isn't being taken before a firing squad.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I have to say that I found the roadkill metaphor extremely insightful. My belief that female promiscuity is unwise is fundamentally disconnected from my opinion that female promiscuity is unappealing. I don't think less of the moral character of a woman who's been raped - indeed, the crisis might even present her with an opportunity to demonstrate her virtue in some way. But it does give me the male equivalent of the proverbial ick, just as it would if she'd had casual sex voluntarily, or been divorced, or tripped and fallen down the stairs onto a man.
I think that this is also why I feel a profound discomfort when I see other men list things like "five or fewer sex partners" as their standard for a woman. Because they're obviously using the more rational standard of the woman's wisdom - they're judging who's wiser, the woman who's had sex with five men or the woman who's had sex with twenty. But in my gut, this looks to me like, do I want the barrel of wine with five spoonfuls of shit in it or the barrel of wine with twenty spoonfuls of shit in it, and I'm just thinking, uh, no, I don't want any of the shit-wine, thanks, I don't care how exactly the shit got there, I don't care to grade it on a curve, and if that's all the wine I can afford I'd rather just be a teetotaler.
I'm pretty sure you can safely eat roadkill if you manage to find the right roadkill and you cook it right. But I'd still rather just not do that.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Much of this problem exists because religious conservatives alienated young women with the abortion issue.
If a young woman can be alienated by being told she should not kill her child then that reflects a problem with her own character. No compromise on this is necessary or acceptable.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I personally fear this process but for a very different reason: I think the peacekeeping effect attributed to MAD was actually mostly on the WW2 mythos. The real reason we haven't had such a terrible war since WW2 is that we have WW2 in living cultural memory, and now it's exiting living cultural memory.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Do you think they expect Pakistan's arsenal to get considerably stronger?
That is my assumption, yeah. At the moment, nuclear war between Pakistan and India wouldn't actually be an MAD scenario; Pakistan would be completely destroyed (and you can't get any more destroyed than that) while India would "merely" suffer the worst disaster in memory. Pakistan and India have similar-sized nuclear arsenals (in terms of number of bombs - India's bombs are much stronger), but India is of course much larger, and they also have much more sophisticated nuclear delivery systems; Pakistan's arsenal is dangerous but it's currently one of the easier nuclear powers in the world to foil an attack from. In the future they'll most likely be more evenly-matched and a nuclear war would actually spell the end of both India and Pakistan.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I don't mean to be a conspiracy theorist, but it looks to me like the powers that be in India are deliberately angling for a nuclear war with Pakistan because they see it as inevitable in the long term but think that the results will be more favorable for them the sooner it happens. Moreover, they're also angling for Pakistan to launch the first (nuclear) strike because they expect the rest of the world will be more sympathetic to them in that case.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Self-demonstrating post?
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I could see it becoming less effective in the near future as it becomes associated with AI; AI draining dry the collective pool of effective rhetoric.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
It occurs to me that the term "serial monogamy" is very directly analogous to "crony capitalism". Or "social justice", for that matter.
Ethics aside, it makes sense as part of a carrot-and-stick approach to making Hamas go away, although it would be a lot more workable if there was an escape hatch available for people to leave Gaza and move anywhere else in the region. Theoretically, a bad enough famine would depopulate the entirety of Gaza and eliminate Hamas that way, but this would be very bad for Israel's international standing compared to a scenario where Gaza is depopulated in a less deadly way.
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